Entrelac Baby Blanket

I mentioned awhile ago that I would eventually post pictures of a project I was working on. Now that I have given it as a gift to my friend for her first child, I feel safe sharing the pictures.

So here it is - a baby blanket/knit quilt. I first knit the top in entrelac from a free pattern I found on Lion Brand Yarn: http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/80661B.html?

Because the baby is a boy, I chose to replace the pink shade that the pattern originally calls for with a shade called "Little Boy Blue" (appropriate, right?).

Now, before knitting this blanket, I never knew anything about how to knit entrelac. But being a firm believer that if you can knit and purl, you can do anything if you set yourself to learning how, I set myself to the task. Two important tips in my mind - if you do not know how to pick up and purl or pick up and knit, the Very Pink YouTube video on picking up and knitting saved my life with this project: http://verypink.com/2010/09/28/pick-up-and-knit/noImages=0. The second tip, on the rows where you will have a knit two together or purl two together to join the square you are creating with the other square, it is always best to begin those rows with a slipped stitch. It makes it so much easier to identify the stitch later when you will be picking it up on the next row.

Anyways, after I finished the top, I purchased some fleece to back it with and some matching fabric for the binding. I then layered the blanket on top of the fleece and pinned the two together. The top wasn't an exact rectangle, so I pinned some spots along the border together to make it a rectangle. I then took a yarn needle and some yarn and put yarn ties at the corner of each square. I then followed some quilting instructions to create some binding from the fabric (I cut 2.5 inch bias strips and sewed them together), and then hand sewed the binding to the blanket (I tried to get it through my sewing machine, but it was too thick and wasn't going through well).

Overall, I'm very pleased with the outcome - it was alot of work, but it really came out as an adorable little blankie. :)

Freegal

So, one escape I have is listening to music. Here's a friendly tip for all you music lovers out there: see if your local library subscribes to "Freegal." It is a music downloading site that is perfectly legal and lets you access music from all Sony recording artists free of charge. There is a limit of three songs per week and you don't have the option of every single artist you hear on the radio, but well, its free... So you can't really complain because its three songs that didn't cost you a single penny (other than the tax dollars you give your library, if you pay property taxes). :)

Some Changes!

With the completion of my reference course, I decided to change the layout of this blog by making the Knitting Pathfinder a separate page. I think this will be better because first, it is now directly linked at the very top of the blog as a separate page, and second, it was so long that I think it would have detracted from the overall layout in the long term. So I hope this will be better.

I'm hoping to soon complete a beautiful blanket I knit in entrelac and backed with fleece as a knit quilt. When I do, I want to post some pictures of it and some tips for how I completed it. So stay tuned! :)

Hi All! :)

So I've never blogged before, but thought that it might be fun. I'm a lawyer, who has not had much luck in this economy with the whole finding a job thing. So I decided to do what I do best, and go back to school. I'm now in the MSIS program at UAlbany, working towards being a librarian.

I say my life is rather cliche because I think people always imagine librarians as being women with glasses, wearing heeled oxfords, always reading a book or knitting or something of that sort, who then go home to a house full of cats. That's pretty much my life, except in addition to the four cats I go home to at the end of every day, I also go home to my husband, Brian.

So this entire blog is starting out as my final project for my Reference class, which was to create a pathfinder. I had decided to do mine on resources for beginning knitters. I was inspired to pick this topic when I recently went crazy trying to figure out how to knit entrelac and found myself doing random Google searches, reading several different websites, and watching YouTube videos. It was frustrating because I had issues finding videos that demonstrated what I needed to know in clear way (because as any knitter knows, there is more than one way to do almost everything). I found myself wishing that someone would just poke me and say "Here's where you can find what you need." So that's what this pathfinder is hopefully going to do for some other people.

So that's how this blog got started. We'll see where it goes from here. :)